1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to methods and systems for optimizing network routing.
2. Description of Related Art
Modern communications networks transport large volumes of information between various locations in a network. Unfortunately, the traffic across any particular link in a given communications network can represent a formidable volume of information and, as the network transports increasingly more traffic, congestion across various links may cause delays in data delivery.
Presently, most conventional network routing protocols, such as OSPF (Open Shortest Path First), use a shortest path first routing scheme to alleviate network congestion and otherwise manage network traffic. Unfortunately, these protocol systems lack versatility, as the process of changing system weights is often excessively time consuming, and the performance of the resulting traffic flow has been difficult to gauge. Thus, new technology to manage networks is desirable.
The present invention provides methods and systems for managing and evaluating network traffic. In various embodiments, a technique is provided for evaluating performance weights assigned to the links of a network. By generating successive sets of weights relating to a performance surface using a variety of heuristic techniques, and then evaluating the weights using a piece-wise linear cost function, a number of performance minima can be found. By continuously searching the performance surface, a champion minimum can be extracted. The cost of the champion minimum, as well as the cost for any other set of heuristically generated weights can be compared to the cost generated by an optimal technique to gauge the performance of the heuristic weights.
In various other embodiments, the performance surface can be quickly and efficiently searched using a variety functions such as an anti-cycling function, an impatience function, a dynamic graph technique and a diversity process. Other features and advantages of the present invention are described below and are apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description which follows.